Legacy of war: "Bombies" that go boom

2003-03-30 04:00:00 PDT Xieng Khouang Province, Laos -- By 10 a.m., Mick Hayes is already on his second demolition of the day. It is a tennis-ball-size bomblet found in the bottom of a 35-year-old crater in the Plain of Jars, a routine little detonation job Hayes' ordnance-clearing team could sleepwalk through.

But when it comes to blowing up leftover bombs in this impoverished country,

where equipment is primitive and unexploded shells lurk underfoot, nothing is routine.

"Ning, Song, Sam! ("One, two, three" in Laotian)," a man in a unit accompanying Hayes' team yells. Another guy punches the button that sets off the TNT charge wrapped around the bomblet 200 hundred yards away. Everyone smiles as the familiar "boom!" rips through the air -- and then a split second later comes the dreaded sound of a high whistle of shrapnel speeding their way.

"Hit the dirt!" one man yells, followed by the "plock-plock" of metal smacking into the huge, 2,000-year-old stone jars all around them.

"Whoo, that'll crease your hair now, won't it?" Hayes calls out to a chorus of chuckles, as everyone checks himself for shrapnel holes.

They are lucky. Hayes, manager of the Laotian unit of the British Mines Advisory Group, the world's leading bomb-clearance organization, lost two men in demolitions a few months ago.

"They say you have to be crazy to do this work, but we're just a little crazy," says Hayes, a 52-year-old ex-Australian army munitions instructor. "The crazy part is the way people have to live with all this stuff in their ground."

If you want the a worst-case scenario for the aftermath of what America's military is doing to Iraq, visit Laos.

Between 1964 and 1973, the United States unleashed upon Laos the most fearsome bombing barrage in history, and the shell pieces and unexploded ordnance left behind utterly changed the way people live. And die.

So many live bombs remain in the soil that when someone wants to build a house or start a rice paddy, the land has to be picked over, inch by inch, by bomb-clearing teams. More than 200 people die every year from bombs the teams can't get to. Hundreds more are injured.

So much metal -- some exploded, much of it not -- fell on this nation during the secret U.S. nine-year bombardment that it became the main source of industrial and domestic metal for decades in Laos. The markets offer thousands of cooking pots, lamps and tableware pieces made from melted-down bombs, or shells chopped into usable shapes.

The most dangerous explosive dumped on Laos, judged by its aftereffects, was the cluster bomb. That's the same bomb that left hundreds dead in Kuwait after the 1991 Gulf War -- and is among the weapons now being hurled at Iraqi forces.

Cluster bombs are a standard part of the U.S. military arsenal, typically gargantuan munitions units about 7 feet tall and 2 feet wide that split in half after being dropped by a warplane. Inside are between 200 and 650 bomblets, nicknamed "bombies" by Laotians.

Most are stuffed with hundreds of metal chunks; after hitting the ground, each canister is designed to explode in a 150-yard arc. Some are filled with napalm, others with molten copper that penetrates armor plating. Others spray metal spikes that can pin a man to a tree.

The nagging design problem with cluster bombs is that 10 to 30 percent of the bombies don't explode after they hit the ground, munitions experts say. But they do blow up later if disturbed, for instance, by being kicked by someone walking over them.

Which is exactly what happens in Laos.

"Everywhere this weapon is used, it causes tremendous problems for civilians, for years after the battle has ended," says filmmaker Jack Silberman of Canada, whose 2001 documentary, "Bombies," is the authoritative account of the effect of cluster bombs on civilians. "Now that is about to happen again in Iraq."

It's already happened next door, in Kuwait.

According to the U.K. Working Group on Landmines, in the first two years after 1991's Desert Storm, more than 1,400 Kuwaitis died from incidents primarily involving unexploded cluster bomblets. At least 200 people died in Iraq from the same cause. And more recently in Afghanistan, more than 100 have died from bombies left over from the 1,228 cluster bombs dropped in the U.S. push to oust the Taliban.

In a typical week in Laos, UXO (UneXploded Ordnance) clearance teams from groups like Hayes' will blow 30 loads like the bombie he and another unit demolished in the Plain of Jars. Most are done in batches, with a dozen or more old shells laid together and denotated with TNT or C-4 explosive.

That's just in this province, a corner of middle-north Laos near the Vietnamese border; UXO Lao, the national clearance program, scrapes up bombs all over this underdeveloped nation of 4 million people.

The bombs are legacies from the so-called shadow war America conducted to crush the communist Pathet Lao and hammer the North Vietnamese Army along the Ho Chi Minh Trail, which runs just inside the Laotian border. In its nine-year pummeling, unknown to most Americans while it was going on, the U.S. dumped 2 million tons of bombs on Laos -- more than one planeload of bombs every 8 minutes. That's more than got dropped on Japan and Germany combined in World War II, and makes Laos the most bombed nation, per capita, in the history of warfare.

The dud rate of the ordnance dropped back then is estimated at 30 percent, leaving about 10 million UXOs in the ground by 1973. Since the end of the war, more than 12,000 villagers been killed by UXOs here; most from bombies, the government estimates.

However, the overall range of UXOs is dizzying, taking in at least 130 different kinds of munitions -- 155mm phosphorous rockets, 120mm mortar shells,

500-pound bombs and more. Even 2,000-pound premodern era bunker busters turn up every few months, poking up through the weeds somewhere, ready to blow. There are also munitions left over from the small-scale ground wars fought in the same era by Laotian, Thai and North Vietnamese forces for control of the country.

Laos was helpless to cope with the problem until the past decade, when Belgium, Denmark, Britain and the U.S. pitched in with millions of dollars and advisers like Hayes to begin clearing the landscape. To date, 376,000 UXOs have been destroyed and about 20 square miles of land cleared -- but there are tens of thousands of square miles left.

"It sometimes feels like trying to push back the tide," says Hayes. "You see people dying all the time, so many bombs, just everywhere."

Hayes' latest effort to push that tide began in November, when he created the first bomb-clearing team of its kind in the world -- a crew of uneducated, dirt-poor villagers trained quickly to clear the very fields they live in, overseen by Mines Advisory Group experts.

The team works on a trial basis now, but Hayes is hoping to get funding to take it to permanent status -- and set a model that may someday spread to other countries, including postwar Iraq.

"With the villagers, we can clear bombs at a cost of about $900 a hectare, instead of the usual $3,000 or so," Hayes says, striding through a rice paddy, supervising an afternoon's clearance by his new team. "Most important, they get a direct stake in their own future. This is their field, their lives. Their nightmare."'

Lakhiem Bouaphane and her 5-year-old daughter, Phet, were cooking a lunch of cabbage over a fire in their dirt yard in December when the war finally caught up to them.

After lying under the soil for decades, a bombie got enough heat from their lunch fire to ignite its fuse. The blast shook the entire yard, ripping off much of Lakhiem's leg and wide chunks of skin from her daughter's hands and face.

"I held my baby close, and it made a big bang," Lakhiem says, sitting in the dust a few feet from where the explosion happened in front of her crude wood-and-tin house in Na Khoun Village. "There was nowhere to go." Her words trail off.

Lakhiem's daughter stares straight ahead, looking shell-shocked even months after her father rushed her to the doctor dozens of miles away in his cart, pulled by the family cow.